Anyone interested in BeOS may want to keep an eye on OpenBeOS (name change pending).
I wish I had picked up a copy of BeOS before it disappeared._________________lolgov. 'cause where we're going, you don't have civil liberties.

I've never used it, but from what I've read, it did what it did really well. An arrogant CEO and lack of apps caused it to die. I say arrogant because he tried to force Apple to do something. Apple did not think highly of that and purchased NeXt and Steve Jobs.

Lets not turn this into a BeOS thread though._________________lolgov. 'cause where we're going, you don't have civil liberties.

BeOS has a "Sweat" multimedia implementation. It works right out of the box with almost all sound and video systems, which is was no easy task. It lacked printer capabilities, and they tried their best to hide the Command Line.

The GUI reminded me of the Original Enlightment from Caldera, the one used in Caldera 1.2. Clean and simple.

beos was sweet. first posix compatible OS to detect ALL of my hardware successfully and have everything working out of the box. INCLUDING my sound card, winmodem (never got it going in linux), and vid card.

nice and fast too. but i had the personal edition and was limited to 200mb of disk space

too bad beos died..._________________I used gentoo BEFORE it was cool.

However if you want BeOS Pro 5, and have $38 to spare then go here.
[url]http://search.store.yahoo.com/cgi-bin/nsearch?catalog=purplus&query=beos&
.autodone=http%3A%2F%2Fstore.yahoo.com%2Fpurplus%2Fnsearch.html[/url]

I installed BeOS for the first time a couple of weeks ago. It seemed really good, but I couldn't handle the (obvious) lack of sound and video support. I'm excited about the progress they're making with openbeos though.
I had a copy of Dano(the last unreleased BeOS version) I could try and dig it up if anyone wants it.

I used BeOS as my only OS for a while, and it was great... I must say though, the video files of Be, Inc. employees throwing computers off of a moderately tall building, and the music files included ("BeOS... It's the OS...") were a fun touch. Time to go check on OpenBeOS' status...